My experience and takeaways on becoming email marketing certified.
I just completed Hubspot’s Email Marketing Certification. The purpose of this blog is to document my experience. As part of my graduate program, I was encouraged to add a marketing certification to my portfolio. Since part of my employment role is to manage email marketing strategy, I thought this would be the perfect certification to pursue.
HubSpot is a company that offers software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They have a mission to help businesses grow with an ecosystem that unites software, education, and community. HubSpot Academy offers free online training for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service professionals.
One of the most in-demand skills in digital marketing, email marketing is the use of email within inbound marketing efforts to promote products, services, and encourage long-term customer relationships. The goal of the course is to teach how to build an effective email marketing strategy and not only reach the inbox, but engage readers by being human and helpful.
The certification course consists of 9 lessons, 28 videos, 9 quizzes, and an exam. It is documented to take 3:18 hours to complete. I completed the certification in smaller sections over the course of my last college term, at the pace of 1-2 lessons each week. The exam had 60 questions, which I completed in approximately 30 minutes.
The curriculum covered the following subject areas:
- Understanding Email Marketing
- Creating a Contact Management and Segmentation Strategy
- Sending the Right Email
- Creating a High-Performing Email
- Understanding Email Deliverability
- Outlining the Design of Your Marketing Emails
- Analyzing Your Marketing Emails
- Testing Your Marketing Emails
- Developing Relationships With Lead Nurturing
The certification process gave me the opportunity to fill in my knowledge gaps. While I’ve been managing email marketing strategy for quite some time, I was excited to learn new techniques to implement. Some of these techniques included strategies on creating high performing emails, analysis/testing, and lead nurturing.
3 Takeaways
Creating a High Performing Email. This section explores the goals of emails and how to optimize each section of an email to drive conversions. It includes important questions to consider, such as the desired outcome, who will be benefiting from the content, what value the reader receives, and how the email fits into other conversations being held with contacts.
Analyzing and Testing Marketing Emails. This section covers how to analyze marketing emails in three parts: individual send metrics, overall email channel metrics, and return on investment. Testable elements can include the subject line, preview text, design, copy, call-to-action, and more. This will make it possible to see how things are trending and calculate conversion rates.
Developing Relationships With Lead Nurturing. I feel like I gained the most from this section. Sometimes, conversion can take time based on where a contact is in the buyer’s journey. Lead nurturing is an opportunity to scale communication with potential customers by sending emails that add value. It covers four key types of emails to use for nurturing campaigns that establish trust, provide resources, and calls-to-action. The content simplified the process of building a lead nurturing campaign by transforming wireframe journeys into workflows.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I enjoyed the process of earning this certification, and believe it is a useful tool for other inbound marketing professionals. I had no disappointments with the curriculum. I liked how the sections and videos were relatively short, which kept the content engaging and interesting. Each section ended with a quiz that allowed me to test my new knowledge. If I were asked to rank from a score of 1 to 5 of recommending this certification to a friend, I would rank 5. Evolving marketing tactics and toolsets require adaptability, and it is vital to stay on top of trends and knowledge of toolsets to reach customers more effectively and improve operational efficiency.
Written by Kimberly O’Hanlon
Blog for MRKT584: Digital Marketing Platforms
Instructor: Nikki Brown
June 5th, 2022
Reference:
Hubspot Email Marketing Certification. https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/email-marketing
